Hiroshima Joe (6 page)

The table next to him was vacated as he arrived, but it was soon re-occupied by a woman in her forties accompanied by three children, two of whom wore white school uniforms. One of the children was a morose-looking boy of about ten.

Sandingham listened to their conversation. With luck, they would fit the bill – a harrassed mother, a pain-in-the-neck child and two other offspring to offer distraction.

‘What do you want, children?’ the mother asked, in a voice tired from traipsing around in the tropical heat.

‘A coffee ice, a coffee ice!’ chanted the youngest child, fighting to be heard over his immediate superior’s demand for a peach melba, also repeated several times. Their voices jarred on Sandingham’s nerves, but he managed to suppress his longing to shout at them.

The sultry boy requested a strawberry ice, his words a near monologue.

‘You know you can’t have an ice-cream, Jeremy,’ the mother retorted. ‘It will hurt too much after the filling. Mr Bingham said you shouldn’t eat until the anaesthetic wears off and the filling sets.’

Bingham: Sandingham knew a dentist by that name. He had known him in times when there had been no supplies of pain-numbing cocaine.

He had not seen Bingham for many years, but he knew the man had a practice on Kowloon-side, near to the Star Ferry. As if in tribute to the dentist, Sandingham pressed his tongue into a space between his right lower molars. It had hurt like hell at the time, but the abcess had been prevented from spreading. The resultant blood poisoning might, in the circumstances, have killed him.

A waiter delivered Sandingham’s iced tea, for which he deliberately and immediately paid. He sipped his drink, pretended to read the newspaper and knew it was only a matter of time.

He was right. Five minutes into the tea, the morose boy stated that he felt ‘woozy’. He shifted from his seat to one next to his mother. She, in turn, shifted her handbag from her lap on to the back of her chair. It was an English-made bag of dark brown leather with long handle-straps.

Choosing his moment carefully, and watching all around him with a skilfully controlled series of glances, Sandingham lifted the bag clear of the chair back, and at once put his newspaper over it, ensuring that the straps did not show. Then he tucked handbag and newspaper under his arm and rose to leave. Safely outside, he turned left up Pedder Street, continued across several junctions into narrower streets and soon arrived at Albany Road. From there it was only a minute or two’s walk into the Botanical Gardens.

Seated on a bench, under the shade of a traveller’s palm, he unfolded the newspaper and, careful not to be observed, snapped open the brass clasp on the handbag. He quickly rummaged inside. A used handkerchief; two lipsticks; a base metal powder compact that sprang open as he touched it, tipping fine talc over him; a packet of State Express 555 cigarettes and a stainless steel Ronson lighter, both of which he removed and pocketed; an address book; a Hong Kong driving licence and a military pass card – the woman was obviously a service wife, which accounted (in his mind) for the fact that her children were unpleasant little bastards; a diary; a batch of letters with British stamps on the envelopes; a comb and a small mirror … one by one, he removed these items of feminine clutter and tossed them into the thick leaf debris at the base of the tree where fibrous leaves had fallen and matted together. He even found a pair of sunglasses, but as they were a lady’s pair in faint blue plastic he could not wear them and reluctantly tossed them into the undergrowth, too.

Finally, in a side flap, he discovered the purse.

The woman being a service wife had had him worried. They weren’t anywhere near as wealthy as the wives of local civil servants or businessmen. But this woman must have been an officer’s spouse: in the purse was a lot of loose change – he counted over five dollars before tipping it all into his jacket. In a billfold within the purse was just over four hundred and fifty Hong Kong dollars and eighteen pounds in sterling.

His hands shook as he transferred the money to the inner pocket of his jacket and then rammed the handbag well down into a low, thorny bush. It was a pity, because the bag itself would have fetched a bit in a pawnshop; but a European man pawning a European woman’s handbag would have aroused suspicion, and he was sure the police kept tabs on pawnshops here just as they did in Britain. Now it would be some time before it was discovered, and by then the damp, the heat and the ants should have reduced it to a state of fragile decomposition.

He knew that he had been very lucky. He had expected he would have had to steal at least three such bags to make up his rent, but at once he had enough and some to spare even without cashing in the sterling. In comparison to what he had been two hours before he was rich.

*   *   *

The green tram pulled up at an island stop in the middle of Johnston Road near a playground which, every evening, attracted hoards of ragamuffin children from the surrounding sidestreets of Wan Chai. Sandingham stepped down and the tram, with much grinding and howling of metal and humming of static electricity, surged off along the sunken road rails towards Causeway Bay and North Point.

He negotiated his way through the heavy evening traffic, crossed Hennessy Road and walked down a narrower street consisting of overcrowded three- and four-storey buildings that were of pre-war construction, and showed it. Their deeply-set balconies provided the pavements with square-pillared arcades: in them collected rubbish, small urchins and elderly Chinese men who seemed to congregate always in twos and threes, seated upon wicker chairs or wooden boxes, chattering and playing
tin kau.

There were shops here, too, mostly selling food. The rice shops displayed their wares in barrels or sacks open at the top, each containing a different type of rice, long grain, short grain and, for all Sandingham knew, thin grain and fat grain. To him food was food, rice was rice; he had little time for variations. The vegetable shops offered trays of water spinach, root ginger, Chinese cabbage, yam-like tubers, spring onions and watercress. The fruit shops sold mangoes and papayas, passion-fruit and oranges, bananas and pomeloes. The lights were just coming on and enhanced the exotic fruits with garish hues.

But the shops were greatly outnumbered by the bars. Wan Chai was the area of dives and brothels, cheap perfume, over-priced drinks and whorehouses, each with a neon sign outside competing with its neighbour for brightness and variation. The area was not far from the Royal Naval dockyard and was also near the Gloucester Road pier where all American sailors landed when coming ashore from warships on what was euphemistically labelled ‘R&R’ – rest and recreation. Sandingham had always been amused at this term for shore leave. They seldom rested and they often re-created.

He turned right into Lockhart Road. Just round the corner was the Vancouver Bar. He had been there often and was known slightly to the proprietor and well-known to the barman. The girls who sat in front of the plywood-panelled bar were a shifting population. They came and went as the mood, the proprietor or their pimps took them. He wondered if Lucy would be working the bar or if she had been moved on.

It was still early in the evening and the US sailors, whose ships were dry of alcohol, had not yet hit shore for a hard drinking night out; nor had Murray Barracks yet released its hoard of British squaddies for whatever dark-hour revelries were on offer: this would very likely include brawls with American crewmen. As he pushed through the bead curtain that separated the bar from the pavement Sandingham noticed the luminous hands of the clock over the drinks shelves. It was seven-fifteen.

The bar was in semi-darkness although it was still more or less daylight outside; the sun was well down over the hills of the distant western islands. In the centre of the large room was an area reserved for dancing, although this usually meant hanging around a bar-girl, hands pressing her buttocks, rather than obeying any musical impulse. This dance floor was in turn hemmed in by wooden and plastic-topped tables, at each of which was a set of metal chairs. The tables were round and bare; the floor was strewn with damp sawdust. In one corner, like a blurting electronic reptile with painted scales and hidden inner lights, was a much-abused jukebox. Overhead, four ceiling fans turned slowly in the half-light.

The rattling of the curtain beads caused a fluster of activity in a back room. The girls were still off duty, and the prospect of an early customer agitated them into action. The barman came out from another doorway, his face beaming in anticipation. He did not lose his smile when he saw Sandingham, even though he knew that this one was not a high-spending, high-rolling Yank from Ohio, hungry for a broad and a beer.

‘Mr Sandin’am, you okay? Long time no see you Wan Chaiside. You go ‘way?’

Sandingham leaned on the bar, rubbing the sole of his shoe on the brass rail that ran along the base on his side of the plywood. The dollar notes were uncomfortable under his instep.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not been away. Just busy on Kowloon-side.’

‘You got job yet?’ asked the barman with artful perspicacity. He added, ‘It no good you got no job. Must have job fo’ money. Fo’ good money. No money, no d’ink, no eat, no livin’.’

It was good to be in the bar once more. Sandingham felt at ease here, as if he were released from the world and its cares, petty slights and dangers in the stink of eau de cologne and sawdust and spilt drink and sweat. Somehow they disguised his worries as effectively as the sanitary wicks killed the stench of stale flesh in his hotel room.

For a brief moment the squalor of it all came to him. It seemed as if he had been living in squalor, or on the ill-defined boundaries of it, for years. He had to admit it to himself, in all honesty. And it wasn’t for lack of ready cash. It was simply a matter of habit. He had grown used to squalor. It suited him; it fitted him. He was disgusted with his world, but accepted it because it accepted him.

In earlier days, they had all sworn that it would not get to them. For many of them, it hadn’t. He saw one or two of them, from time to time, from a distance and true to type they had reverted to wearing starched white shirts and old regimental or mercantile company ties. They wore polished brown shoes, had creases pressed into their trousers, drove Ford or Austin cars, and carried leather briefcases, and talked to their wives in the street. They had succeeded. He had not.

‘Hey! You like beer, Johnny?’

Sandingham looked up. He had been staring at his shoe.

‘This no’ Johnny,’ said the voice, not loudly yet as if broadcasting the news. ‘This Joe. Hi, Joe! How you doin’ now? Long time you no come.’

‘Hello, Lucy.’ He was glad to see her and it showed in his eyes. ‘You’re still here, then.’

She was of that indeterminate age between sixteen and thirty when it is hard to judge a Chinese woman’s years. In fact, she was nineteen, but it would have been difficult to pin her down to an age or guess from her appearance. She was short and very slim, with small breasts and hip-bones that pushed hard against the tightness of her turquoise brocade cheong-sam. On her feet she wore a pair of soft cloth shoes and on her left wrist a cheap watch. She wore no other jewellery. Her hair was black, loose and long, reaching to her shoulder-blades. Her skin was sallow in colour and soft in texture; her cheekbones were not as high, and her eyes were rounder than many of her peers in the bar-world. Nevertheless she had the hard edge of the prostitute about her: a certain steeled look in her eyes, a distancing. Her voice could be raucous, and she could use her tongue with curt viciousness to put down any man that displeased her: but every bar-girl has a dream that one man will be unlike the rest, and Joe Sandingham was the one that inhabited her fantasies.

‘I stiwl here. Where I got to go? You no tak’ me out. You no buy me bar-girl champagne.’

He smiled because he liked her, and because the last word was the only one she had pronounced properly.

‘Tonight, I buy you d’ink,’ he teased.

This mild mockery pleased her for he often seemed so deep in sorrow, even in the easy atmosphere of the Vancouver Bar and her company. Most of the men she knew were happy enough, if only artificially so, prompted by gin, rum or rye whiskey. Joe was rarely in possession of even so much as a fragment of joy.

‘Maybe buy me out one hour.’ It wasn’t a statement or a question, but a hybrid of the two.

The barman poured Sandingham a beer in a narrow tumbler and gave Lucy an innocuous-looking fizzy drink in a flat-bowl martini glass. It was faintly yellow and came out of a champagne bottle. The bottle was only for show and to allay the fears of any half-cut jack-tar who might question where the bubbly stuff came from: in fact, it was lemonade diluted with a little cold tea to give it colour.

The beer cost a dollar, the champagne one seventy-five – to a sailor. The barman winked at Sandingham and charged him one-fifty for the two. Even that price was well over the street value for the contents of both glasses.

Lucy took the drinks to a cubicle beside the jukebox. Sitting down, she gabbled something in rapid Cantonese to the barman, who nodded. Then, reaching behind the jukebox, she turned the volume down two notches and set a slow dance record into play.

It was close and dark in the cubicle. The bench seat faced outwards and was padded with simulated leather that stuck to the skin of the girl’s thighs where they came into contact with it, through the slit in the side of her cheong-sam. The table in front of them bore a candle in a bottle which was lit but guttering from too long a wick. Sandingham took a long pull from the glass of beer. It was a local brew, made primarily from chemical additives. Lucy sipped her ‘tart’s tonic’, as the sailors nicknamed it, her little finger crooked as if she were taking tea in the best rectory of the thirties’ not far from Basingstoke or Oxford. Most men would have laughed at her. Sandingham did not. It was a part of her imagined world, and he acknowledged it as important to her. To him, even.

‘How you bin, Joe? You no comin’ here makin me ve’y sad.’ Her brows rutted and she looked at him in the candlelight and glow from the jukebox.